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Monday, November 11, 2013

Blairite Chutzpah

In the Independent John Rentoul attacks John Major's record on social mobility in comparison to St Tony. There is much in the article that strikes me as nonsense but this is particularly disingenuous:

But what did Major do to work to change the system while he was Prime
Minister? He sneered at Tony Blair as “another public school-educated
Socialist” in his 1995 Tory conference speech. That would be the Tony
Blair who sent all his children to state schools, the first prime
minister to do so. The Tony Blair who raised standards in state schools
especially in London, under Major an under-invested disaster area for
the education of working-class children. The Tony Blair who introduced
academy schools to replace schools that had failed their disadvantaged
pupils.

The state schools that Blair sent his children to were hardly "bog standard comprehensives", but the what is really incredible is praising academy schools.

Academy schools are a great idea but when Labour introduced they weren't exactly an entirely new idea. They are almost identical to the Grant Maintained Schools introduced by the Conservatives which flourished under John Major and were then abolished by Tony Blair. To compare Blair to Major favourably by pointing to Academies is simply ludicrous.